Category Archives: Final project report

This collection of posts comprise the final project report, sharing major outcomes, lessons learnt and the technical approach of the project.

Major Outputs
Background
The Challenge
The Mobile Advantage
Lessons Learnt
Technical Approach
Conclusions and Recommendations

Conclusions and recommendations

The objective to “address the challenges involved in delivering quality academic content to mobile devices” has been largely met. Many of those challenges will take time to resolve, such as the issue of third party materials being provided in formats … Continue reading

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The challenge

The challenge for MACON was to address the difficulties involved in delivering quality academic content to mobile devices in a seamless and user-friendly manner through a resource discovery interface. The purpose of the project was to explore the possibilities and share … Continue reading

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Technical Approach

The MACON interface has been developed by adapting MIT’s mobile web project which is an open source software and taking inspiration from NCSU mobile web project. We tweaked the code and user interface elements to meet our requirements and have also enhanced WURFL … Continue reading

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Lessons Learnt

Mobile Discovery This project reinforced that developing for mobile devices is complex because of the wide range of operating systems, browsers, screen resolution and processing power that are in common use at present. We also learnt that our users do … Continue reading

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The Mobile Advantage

The project has given us the opportunity to verify what our learners want from a single search box for mobiles and to improve the mobile search tool we offer. Working with the EBSCO API has provided our Systems Development team … Continue reading

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Background

The Open University is the biggest university in the UK with more than 260,000 students. We are a distance learning university, so very few of our students ever visit the library building in person. Only our ~1200 full time research students … Continue reading

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Major Outputs

1. Prototype discovery tool for delivery of academic content to mobile devices. The discovery tool draws on the EBSCO API to return search results within the Open University Library’s mobile website. The user requirements and the technical approach for this prototype … Continue reading

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